Parks Associates attended DistribuTECH this year to talk with executives, gather information on the pulse of the industry, and understand new and emerging trends, specifically focused on the consumer perspective.

Smart Meter Trends

The next generation of meter deployments will take advantage of what early adopters have learned from utilizing smart meters as a sensor in the distribution network. For example, many utilities use a select group of meters as bellwether sensors for each circuit in the distribution network to optimize transformer and capacitor bank settings. Smart meter vendors have previously stated that no utility uses smart meters as a real time sensor for volt/VAR control, but many utilize meter data as a secondary control loop. Given this and many other applications, some of the new RFPs require AMI and backhaul networks to communicate meter data every five seconds to the head end, which is radical improvement over accessing 15-minute data every 24 hours, and will enable many compelling consumer applications.

From the article "Smart meters, data analytics, and BYOD" by Tom Kerber.

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